He completed his first novel, a fantasy entitled The Infinity Concerto, at 19, but in the following decade published only a handful of short stories. He had sold his first story, Destroyer (1967), to Robert AW Lowndes’ Famous Science Fiction when he was 15.

He later narrated shows at the Reuben H Fleet Space Theater, which opened in 1973, and worked in secondhand bookshops. He has had his paintings exhibited at the Ray Bradbury Museum.Īfter gaining his BA in English from San Diego State College (now University), Bear worked as a lecturer for tourists at the San Diego Air and Space museum in Balboa Park. This would evolve into San Diego Comic-Con, now the biggest annual comics and entertainment convention in the US.īear continued to draw and paint, providing illustrations to Bjo Trimble and Dorothy Jones Heydt’s self-published Star Trek Concordance (1969) and cover paintings to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy (the latter illustrating one of his own stories). Through a film club at the school, he met future writers David Clark, John Pound, Scott Shaw and Roger Freedman, and in 1969 the five participated in the early planning for the following year’s Golden State Comic Book Convention. Already a science fiction fan – a Star Trek enthusiast from the first broadcast – he was soon writing and drawing comics. In between, the family were posted to Texas and Rhode Island, Dale serving on aircraft carriers during the Vietnam war before retiring as a lt commander.įrom Horace Mann junior high and Pershing middle schools Greg went on to study advanced English at Crawford high school. He developed big ideas, conceptually and physically, into exciting and compelling stories, able to evoke a sense of wonder while possessing a depth of characterisation not often found in novels about cutting-edge science.īorn in San Diego, California, Greg was the only son of Wilma (nee Merriman) and Dale Franklin Bear, a meteorologist in the US Navy, stationed in Japan, the Philippines and Alaska.

His near-future technothrillers Quantico (2005) and Mariposa (2009), for instance, deal with domestic terrorism, a conflict between federal government and states that threaten to secede, and the rise of a populist president who manipulates the supreme court to his own ends.

The work he did to research them with thinkers and institutions made them remarkably prescient, not only scientifically – he is attributed with the first descriptions of nanotechnology – but also politically. The American science fiction writer Greg Bear, who has died aged 71 following heart surgery, was, as he put it “all over the map” as far as interests and subjects were concerned: genetics, starships, politics, artificial constructs and combat in space were among the themes explored in his 35 novels.

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